At last, a decent thread in this part of the forum.
So who gets my vote?
I'm undecided, as there are several preferences. Since I am young now at this time (18 to be precise), I'd be biased towards Joan of Arc or Alexander as they were at their peak during their youngest years. However there are better choices in my more professional opinion.
Abe Lincoln is perhaps the best president America has ever had (and probably the best they will ever have) and he accomplished much considering the political instability of America at the time.
Hammurabi wrote up the most extensive code of laws for his time (everybody else simply had two stone tablets with 'Thou shalt not...' repeated 10 times).
Gandhi would get a vote out of his compassion. However he would be too much of a pacifist and perhaps too much of a tree-hugger (there needs to be compromise between environmentalism and progress. Not one or the other).
Elizabeth would also be a likely candidate, as her reign brought England out of the piles of its own waste and into history as a world superpower. She encouraged people to challenge the authority of the Pope, encouraged the arts (don't forget that Shakespeare lived in her time).
As for who wouldn't get my vote:
Bismarck despised democracy, Mao Tse Tung is a butcher, Shaka is a butcher, Xerxes is a deadbeat scumbag who would squander the nation's treasury (he did towards the end of his reign. Most of the building projects he squandered the treasury on remained incomplete) and Montezuma would answer all problems with 'The Gods want more sacrifices!!!', and ultimately grab innocent people off the street and stab them at an altar. Being democratic, the country should be beyond that.
